Label: Comatonse Recordings – C.035
Format: 2 x CD, Compilation
Country: Japan
Released: 1 Dec 2024
Genre: Electronic, Non-Music, Stage & Screen
Style: Electroacoustic, Ambient, Experimental, Modern Classical, Sound Collage, Spoken Word
Immense electroacoustic works and Trojan horse tactics spanning a 20 year timespan within the labyrinthine career of mastermind Terre Thaemlitz.
This really is the one we’ve been waiting for. Thaemlitz’ ambient / computer music releases of the mid-90s, most notably on the defunct Mille Plateaux label along with Soil on Instinct Ambient, were pretty much the gateway drug into a musical world we haven’t left since. With most now out of print, Snowflakes & Dog Whistles rounds up material from a range of otherwise forgotten titles, re-presented with accompanying 9000 world essay that’s surely as poignant now as ever.
Snowflakes assembles the stylistically, more commonly codified ‘ambient’ or as she puts it ‘pretty’ material within her oeuvre. Often beatless, free-floating and unfathomably DEEP, tracks like ‘Agnostiko sa Dabaw’ exhibit Thaemlitz’ unrivalled ear for delicately detailed soundscapes and acute psychoacoustic sub-bass spatialisation effects that possess an anaesthetic affect. Whereas the meditative piano motifs and and decaying catholic prayer loops of ‘Canto I: Rosary Novena For Gender Transitioning’ displays an uncanny ability of using collaged sound to create atmosphere and tension whilst raising questions.
Dog Whistles gathers up Terre’s more chaotic sample-based material, often overtly exploring (and heavily critiquing) themes of gender, sexual varience and Neo-liberalism. Equipt with a wry, almost self-deprecating sense of humour, Thaemlitz’ is able to present the absurdity and hypocrisy within modern society alongside the pink-washing of queer culture through razor-sharp juxtaposition of soundbites.
It’s like a dense thematic time-compression. Undoubtably heavily loaded music, intensely enjoyable and conceptually engaging. Honestly this is the stuff that’s so close to our hearts, no one does it better. (Mint / New - with x2 posters).
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Snowflakes & Dog Whistles: Best Electroacoustic Ambient & Sexpanic 1995-2017 is a double-CD compiling twenty-nine of Terre Thaemlitz' best electroacoustic ambient and computer music works produced between 1995 to 2017, including many special edits only available on this release. The majority of these tracks have been physically out of print for decades, and were originally released on a variety of labels including Mille Plateaux, Daisyworld Discs (Haruomi Hosono of YMO's private imprint), Instinct Ambient, Caipirinha Productions, and of course Thaemlitz' own Comatonse Recordings. The first disc, Snowflakes, focuses on tracks that are more conventionally ambient or perhaps even "pretty." Dog Whistles, the second disc, compiles tracks featuring a chaotic array of samples and sounds that are more overtly related to themes of gender- and sexual variance.
Thaemlitz frames the tracks with a new 9000 word essay spread across two large posters, providing a basic introduction to the underlying topics, ideas, contexts and histories behind electroacoustic ambient - both as a genre in the broader sense, and in specific relation to her own work. From the text:
Most of the questions posed over the years in these tracks remain in tension with contemporary mainstream views, including those coming from the LGBT establishment. In this way, one might say a thread running through my projects is that they remain "unlistenable" to most. Any potential critical use value of these tracks emerges from understanding how they are utterly symptomatic of a particular social system - even in their dissonance. Or, to be more precise, because of their dissonance.
Self-released on Comatonse Recordings with custom packaging hand assembled by Terre herself, the package includes two CDs in an archival vinyl pouch with two double-sided insert cards (100mm x 100mm), phonograph style anti-static inner sleeves, and two 4x4 panel poster insert printed on newsprint (472mm x 472mm).
Tracklist
Snowflakes
1-1 Means From An End I: Means From An End 10:25
1-2 Entre L'Action Et Le Deuil.001 2:13
1-3 Resistance To Change III: Resignation 3:16
1-4 Resistance To Change IV: Tranformative Nostalgia 3:07
1-5 Residual Expectation [Edit] 6:33
1-6 Agnostiko Sa Dabaw [Edit] 5:55
1-7 Rambles (Down in the Park) [Edit] 8:17
1-8 Canto I: Rosary Novena For Gender Transitioning (Alt. Ver.) [Edit] 17:29
1-9 Means From An End VI: End To A Means 8:15
1-10 The Dream Will Carry Me [Edit] 1:15
1-11 Homeward [Edit] 6:20
1-12 A Quiet Of Intimacy Mirrors Distance [Edit] 5:22
Dog Whistles
2-1 Means From An End IV: Means To A Means 7:37
2-2 One (Strength In Numbers) 3:45
2-3 There Was A Girl/There Was A Boy.INTERSEX 5:38
2-4 What Is Between Is Missing 7:35
2-5 Genrecide (I Wish Tricky'd Die Any Way I Hope) [Edit] 5:20
2-6 Cycles [Edit] 3:55
2-7 Names Have Been Changed [Edit] 6:55
2-8 Little Girls Couldn't Murder Anyone [Edit] 5:35
2-9 Admit It's Killing You (And Leave) [Edit] 3:08
2-10 Taking Stock In Our Pride 2:47
2-11 There Was A Girl/There Was A Boy.WENDY 2:05
2-12 Trans Am (Transgendered American) [Edit] 3:24
2-13 She Maybe May Be... [Edit] 4:03
2-14 D.C. D.O.A. 1:10
2-15 Facilitator [Edit] 5:13
2-16 Between Empathy And Sympathy Is Time (Apartheid) [Edit] 4:32
2-17 Schizophonalysis 5:34
